Introduction

This chapter develops a comparison of two projects based in the West End of Newcastle, both of which involved university–third sector collaborations focused on place-based action. Both of the projects began in 2015 and before the general election of that year, in a policy environment that combined severe cuts (from a relatively high base in terms of urban policy) with a multifaceted emphasis on public service innovation. One was the Fenham Pocket Park and the other was the Reclaim the Lanes project. The authors are David Webb, Armelle Tardiveau and Daniel Mallo (university researchers), and Caroline Emmerson (former Youth and Community Manager at the CHAT [Churches Acting Together] Trust), Marion Talbot (Newcastle City Councillor) and Mark Pardoe (Friends of Fenham Pocket Park Secretary). The projects took place at a time when the government was reforming public services amid a rhetoric of ‘localism’, which was perceived by many commentators as a way of focusing public attention on alleged top-down control under the earlier New Labour government and away from the real causes of austerity (Kisby, 2010; Levitas, 2012), while driving a broadly conceived privatisation agenda (Myers, 2017; Findlay-King et al, 2018). Nevertheless, in this chapter, we offer some empirical reflections on our efforts to take localism at its word and, by working within the envelope of this policy agenda, to extend democracy to communities and to everyday life.

Our core argument here relates to the tensions that arise from the simultaneous pursuit of localism and austerity. These tensions are also contextualised by the marketisation of the third sector and by the concentration of decision-making power within council structures. These conditions, we will argue, have important implications for the form of democratic innovation we were able to achieve, as well as, ultimately, the outcomes arising from the projects. In combination, their effect was to undermine and contain efforts at democratic innovation that might otherwise have come closer to the populist policy rhetoric of achieving ‘a radical shift of power from the centralised state to local communities’ (HM Government, 2010: 2). Through the two projects, we explore the limits that austerity places on social innovation and the implications these may have for the civic university agenda in a future that is likely to be defined by a postpandemic economic agenda.